Remember when “anti-Communist” was a preferred leftist term of abuse? “Oh, you’re an anti-Communist” — translation: you’re not one of the trendy people and, moreover, you probably harbor “McCarthyite” tendencies and think Ronald Reagan (the American cowboy) is more of a hero than Mikhail Gorbachev, the glamorous prophet of perestroika.

Think back to the 1980s. Was there any cool person you knew who didn’t glamorize Gorbachev? Every academic (near enough) did, and of course the media slobbered all over the guy. Was he a Communist to the very end? Yes, but for Dan-Diane Sawyer-Rather, for the battalions of scribes who scribbled about such things in the pages of the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post and other approved outlets, Gorbachev was the hero, Reagan the crazy, trigger-happy anti-Communist.

“Star Wars”: Oh, with what contempt they uttered that dismissive phrase. “Evil Empire,” forsooth. What a dangerous clown he was. Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, his plan to deploy a missile defense system (which, incidentally, he offered to share with the Soviet Union): what a joke, what a stupidity! It was ruinously expensive and [deep breath] would never work and destabilizing and why-would-we-need-to-protect-ourselves-from-a-cuddly-sophisticate-like-Mikhail-Gorbachev-with-his-chic-wife?

Then, quite suddenly, the Soviet Union was no more. It just, you know, vanished. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.” Reagan said that one day in Berlin and, presto-change-o, down came the wall. Star Wars, SDI, had helped expose the empty, burnt-out shell that was the fag-end of the lumbering, senile Communist redoubt. And then at last all the beautiful, right-thinking (i.e., left-leaning) folk who had ridiculed Reagan and Star Wars and his repulsive talk of the Soviet Union being an “Evil Empire” — suddenly, they woke up and realized what fools they had been and thanked Reagan and those who had supported him for helping to end one of the most monstrous tyrannies in history …

Except, of course, they did no such thing. Reagan was still, must always be to blame, though enough water has passed under the bridge by now that he is no longer scary because he has receded into the impotence of history.

No one talks about anti-Communists now because that threat — under that name, anyway — has more or less passed. Today’s anti-Communists are the Islamophobes, those folks (like me) who think that the Islamic effort to spread Sharia (i.e., Islamic law)is fundamentally incompatible with liberal democracy with its principles of free speech, freedom of religion, and political equality of men and women.

“Islamophobia”: what sort of beast is that? A phobia, as I have been at pains to point out in this space and elsewhere, is an irrational fear or hatred. Is it irrational to fear and hate an ideology that denies the equality of the sexes, murders apostates and homosexuals, wishes to subjugate the non-Islamic world, and has consigned Jews and Christians to the perilous second-class citizenship of dhimmitude? (“First the Saturday People,” runs an Islamic slogan, “then the Sunday People”: first we’ll deal with the Jews, then move on to the Christians.)

Who rules the language, rules the world. Orwell knew that. And so does the Left. “Islamophobia” is a mendacious neologism designed to obscure the reality of Islamic ideology. Major Nidal Hasan shouts “Allahu Akbar” and murders 13 people at Fort Hood. What do you call that? I call it “Islamic terrorism.” The Obama administration insists it’s “workplace violence.” In 2007, some young Muslim packs a Jeep Cherokee full of propane canisters and detonates it at the Glasgow airport. What do you call that? I call it “Islamic terrorism.” Jacqui Smith, then the British home secretary, insists that we call it “anti-Islamic activity.” (How’s that for an example of the “no-true-Scotsman” fallacy?)

In a brilliant, no-to-be-missed column for Frontpage.com, the Scandinavian-based Bruce Bawer reports on the Left’s latest piece of linguistic mendacity: “counterjihad.” Yesterday it was the anti-Communists who were the bad guys. Today, it’s the counterjihadists.

The “counterjihadists” are the villains — the hysterics, the fools, who see a Muslim under every bed, with a bomb in his turban. Meanwhile the good guys are the counter-counterjihadists — the journalists, activists, and others who make a career of slamming Islam’s critics, whom they frequently represent (especially over here in Scandinavia) as “conspiracy theorists.” For just as the anti-Communists of yesteryear were viewed not as sober, well-informed students of life behind the Iron Curtain but as obsessive, ignorant haters, we counterjihadists are viewed not as people who’ve read the Koran and studied Islamic societies and subcultures but as semi-literate morons and bigots.

It's already too late. There's no way America can withstand the Islamo/Jihadist onslaught. It first began way before 9/11 in the prisons, then it moved into the universities and is now slowly becoming mainstream. It's really a by-product of the 60s "revolution".

Islamic "exceptionalism" is becoming a fait accompli - you can do and get away with nearly anything just by donning the Islamic mantle.

Among some circles that I frequent, having an Islamic or at least an Arabic tattoo is now considered a sign of solidarity and sophistication. The Palestinian "kaffiyeh" or scarf is now de rigueur in even the most elegant and sissified houses of haute couture (I don't know why all this French is coming out today) in Milano and Paris.

9/11 was not "wake up call" for Americans. Instead, in a way, you could say it was the last nail on the coffin. Americans can hardly "save" for their retirement, their horizons are limited to their latest credit card statement, their credit score, Halloween and wide-screen TV sets. With this mental acumen, the Jihadists are having a field day......the last stand of the Dodo birds.

I'd like to submit an example of left wing language abuse which is happening right now. I'm referring to Obama and Co.'s controversially endless repetition of the phrase "phony scandals". It's clear that they made the decision to use this phrase to diminish that fact that these are really not scandals at all, but abuses of power born of the systematic corruption throughout this administration. In using the word "scandal" these outrages become something rather petty, just naughty episodes of the eyebrow-raising sort. They would have used the word "flap" but the Clintons beat them to it back in the Lewinsky days. Obama and Co. were very clever because now politicians and the media are repeating the word "scandal" and the actual "corruption" has been able to slither off into the darkness.

Just a note, the term Counter-Jihad was propagated by Anti-Islam voices. The play is on the term counter-terrorism which is a euphamism for the real enemy....Islamic Jihad. Instead of Anti-Jihadist or Anti-Islamist or Anti-Islam or Anti-Islamification and so on and so forth.

It isnt a word that people hostile to the Counter-Jihad created to smear them with. It's a meme which forces the recognition of Islamic Jihad in it's mere utterance. That doesnt stop people intent on ignoring Islamic Jihad from ignoring it. But for those without an agenda, it puts Jihad squarely on the table as the enemy and that the movement is a reaction to aggression by Muslims.

There's an interesting subtext to the Hilton Kramer quote in your article. It mentions that individuals who disliked Communism back before it was stylish to do so were referred to as "(no kidding) 'premature anti-Communists'". You quote this without noting the irony.

Back during the McCarthy era, one of the ways the FBI decided someone was suspect, supposedly, was whether they opposed Hitler and the Nazis prior to Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war. The logic was that in the '30s, the center of opposition to Nazi Germany was Soviet Communism: if you opposed the Nazis, you were probably at least at a few cocktail parties with various Communist operatives here in the States. Such individuals were designated...wait for it..."premature anti-Fascists". Both the people calling others "premature anti-Communists, and the writer of the article, must have known about this earlier McCarthy-era designation, and used a version of it themselves...

Actually it was whether someone who opposed Hitler prior to the USSR's signing of the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop "non-aggression" pact in August 1939, suddenly dropped that opposition in accordance with the new Comintern line, and then became anti-Hitler again in June 1941 after the Nazis invaded the USSR. That was actually a pretty good metric, given that it is pretty hard to square those zig-zags with independent, rational thought, let alone principled opposition to fascism.

PAF was actually the basis for draft exemption. These guys, Lincoln Brigade vets and others, were just about the only ones in America with combat experience against a major modern power and the US, rightly I think, refused to let them in the US military.

No doubt Sontag at all thought they were pulling a cute word play on the rubes. Sorta like a Muslim married to a Jew who, if she takes and uses her husband's name is Humma Wiener; any 9th Grade boy can figure that one out, but the smart lefties and Muslim moles think it is beyond the ken of the rubes.

I've done enough historical research to well know you can't ever say anything with absolute certainty. Try researching the authorized ranks of Confederate officers from late '64 on! Anyway, some might have gotten in, but Premature anti-Fascist (PAF) was a draft exemption.